Detlev Rohweder was a German manager, politician and chairman of the ‘Trehandanstalt’ who was assassinated at his home by a sniper on 1 April 1991.
Contents
Wiki/Biography
Detlev Rohwedder was born Detlev Carsten Rohwedder on Sunday, 16 October 1932 (aged 58 at death) at his grandparents’ home in Gotha, Thuringia, Germany. In 1953, he graduated from high school in Meldorf in Western Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Later, he studied law and economics in Hamburg and Mainz.
Rohweder’s birthplace is in Gotha
Address
Detlev Rohweder lived at 72 Kaiser-Friedrich-Ring, Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Detlev Rohweder’s house
Family
Relationships, wife and children
In 1960, Detlev Rohweder married Hargard Toussaint, a judge. While studying, Haggard Toussaint met her husband, Detlev Carsten Rohwedder. He served for a long time as judge in the asylum chamber of the administrative court in Düsseldorf.
Detlev Rohwedder with his wife Haggard Rohwedder
The couple had two children, Philip Rohwedder and Cassiely Rohwedder. Philip Rohwedder was a former Warner Bros. CEO for German-speaking countries, and Cassie Rohwedder was an American business newspaper reporter.
livelihood
Detlev Rohwedder began his career in 1963 as head of the legal and tax department at the Düsseldorf auditing firm ‘Continental Treuhandgesellschaft’ and by 1965, he became co-owner. In 1969, Rohweder joined the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and entered politics. In the same year, he became State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Economics. In 1979, Rohwedder returned from politics to industry. He was appointed head of Dortmund Steel Group Hoch.
On 3 July 1990, Rohwedder was appointed Chairman of the ‘Treuhandenstalt’ and by 1991, he became President of the ‘Treuhandenstalt’. The ‘Treuhandanstalt’, often spelled ‘Truehand’, was an agency established by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before German reunification. In 1991, with the fall of ‘The Berlin Wall’, Rohwedder was offered the toughest job in the German economy; To secure, reorganize and privatize the assets of the GDR’s state-owned enterprises, including 8,000 industrial plants. The GDR was the eastern part of Germany, ruled by a communist party known as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The GDR’s communism was protected by the ‘Stasi’, the GDR’s secret police and intelligence, which monitored citizens suspected of having any political resistance to the SED.
Detlev Rohwedder in Treuhand
Death
On 1 April 1991, Easter Monday, Detlev Rohweder was assassinated by a sniper at 11.30 pm in his office, on the first floor of his villa in Düsseldorf-Niederkassel.
On the diagonal opposite side of the allotment garden, three shots were fired using a Belgian G1 rifle from a distance of 63 metres. Detlev Rohwedder was killed by the first bullet as he stood up from his desk. The second bullet hit his wife Hergard in the arm and the third hit a bookshelf.
There are bullet marks on the window of Detlev Rohwedder’s house.
Just three minutes after the shooting, Düsseldorf police launched a massive search operation, but the attacker escaped leaving no trace of the murder weapon. Three cartridge cases, a plastic chair, a towel, binoculars, three cigarette butts and a confession letter signed by a Red Army Fraction (RAF) commando, Ulrich Wessel, were recovered from the crime scene.
Rohwedder’s body being removed from his Düsseldorf villa
The RAF was an extremist terrorist organization in the Federal Republic of Germany. Ten years after the crime, the DNA of an RAF member, Wolfgang Grammes, who had already died in Bad Kleinen in 1993, was identified from a towel found at the crime scene, but from the butts by analysis of saliva on three cigarettes. Turns out they were smoked by a person with blood group A; And so, suspicion grew on Wolfgang Grammes. So far, investigators have followed approximately 1,000 traces, but the ‘Truehand’ special commission was disbanded without finding the killer.
Raph Terrorist-Wolfgang Grams
Controversy
Haggard Rohwedder accused the ‘Stasi’, the GDR’s secret police, of planning and being involved in the murder of her husband Detlev Rohwedder. Trauhand and her husband were reportedly supposed to locate SED party property that had disappeared with a value of 800 million Deutschemarks. Communist mismanagement caused Rohwedder to close hundreds of plants that were in poor condition, resulting in mass unemployment and turning Rohwedder into a capitalist. The Communists were angry at their spectacular fall from power and wanted to regain their position. This supports the theory that the Stasi murdered Rohwedder, and blamed the RAF for the murder. Hergard aroused suspicion because in previous killings by the RAF he had never shot at the victim’s family. In an interview he said,
In previous killings the RAF never fired on the victim’s family, never! And they fired at us several times; My husband collapsed immediately and I walked into the room a few seconds later and he fired the fatal shot at me… It was very well planned – the right time of the day when he would leave his desk to go to bed. Got up. Such was the case that people with experience in security policy were convinced that it could not have been the RAF alone.
Spies also theorized that the RAF was tipped off by a Stasi agent employed by the security firm that had installed bullet-proof glass windows on the ground floor of Rohwedder’s home.
Awards/Honors
- Detlev Rohwedder was named ‘Manager of the Year’ in 1983.
- In 1985, the Ruhr Press Association awarded Rohwedder the “Iron Reynolds” award.
- In November 1990, he was again voted ‘Manager of the Year’.
- In 1992, in honor of Detlev Carsten Rohwedder, the House of Ministries building in Berlin was renamed the ‘Detlev Rohwedder Building (Detlev Rohwedder Haus)’.
Detlev Rohwedder Building
- In 1999, the Detlev Rohweder Award was established in his honour. The award was awarded for special achievements in regulation in the social market economy from 1999 to 2006.
Facts/General Knowledge
- Despite the exposed position of the Düsseldorf Villa, the assassination site, the windows on the upper floor were not made of bulletproof glass – unlike the ground floor windows.
- Three to four days before the murder, some suspicious activity such as late night calls and doorbells ringing at midnight indicated to Haggard Rohwedder that something was going on. In an interview he said,
They called at night, at two or three o’clock…it was no one’s turn. Just silence. The doorbell rang again at night – I did not open the door. But I looked down. Nothing, no one to see.
- During the interview, she also revealed about a large car that was parked nearby the day before the murder, in which a couple was sitting. He said,
We spent Sunday in Essen and handed out big bouquets of flowers to everyone…When we got home, I made a mistake that I regret to this day. Next to it was a big car in which a young couple was sitting. It was Sunday afternoon. There was a law office in the house, there was no reason to be there on Sunday. I wanted to go, but my husband said: “Come on, leave it, what’s the matter, we’re going in!” They must have been murderers! At least I could write down the car number. I really blame myself for this.
- Detlev Rohweder was a bibliophile. After Treuhand, he wanted to become an antiquarian in the book trade. Hergard Rohweder said,
He dreamed of a good bookshop in Strasbourg. A man like him would have been out of time today, also because of his literary and historical education.’
- On September 25, 2020, Netflix premiered a documentary on the unsolved mystery of the murder of Detlev Rohwedder and the strange evidence recovered.
A Perfect Crime (2020)
- Remembering her husband in an interview, Haggard Rohwedder said,
He was a caring patriot. An idealist who was happy to help in this great work. A youth today in this brutally divided country can hardly imagine what it was like when the wall was built. Broke all relations between people. And to carefully bring him back to make Germany, yes, Germany, that was his goal.
Grave of Detlev Rohweder
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn